Them

The more I tried to not see them the more they flashed into my brain, beating into my eyelid’ls until they rose above me like obnoxious monuments of folly. The more I turned away the more they loomed and when I ran they followed me, beckoning and taunting like voracious whores on a rainy night in Kansas City. That night boomed into my head and I clenched my eyes shut tight trying to shut out the monstrous conflagration of their wants and needs. The rain felt visceral on my skin, the cold drops piercing like dull ice picks. They weren’t there but I could feel them…flickering and pulsing like bus-stop fluorescent lights dingy and clinging to desperate life while all hope faded long ago. I couldn’t use them, ut was against the rules and all the gods in heaven only knew what any infraction might bring. My heart pumped in slow forensic thuds like an old hefer plodding through the mire desperate for the warm shelter of the barn. The distance is too far and she knows it. It was bound to happen and it might have happened already. If ai was brave I would look behind and check, go through every morsel and mote. But the fear is real and the knowledge of failure is its own horror while the unsatisfactory bliss of ignorance holds its own appeal. The apex of finality will be the arbiter of the promiscuously and profane exercise. All so unnecessary and a grandstand of self-flagellation for sins that are nobody’s fault. Maybe yours, but I can’t be good at controlling every urge and fantasmal need. The flickering lights pull the eyelids open and the pupil loses itself in study of an independent orbital confession. The far woods, entangled and thickened by animosity leave no room to hide from them. No matter how I run or panic or find new courses, the roots amd brambles pull at me, tearing at flesh.